"Free Spaces" in Collective Action

"Free Spaces" in Collective Action
Author(s): Francesca Polletta

Source: Theory and Society , Feb., 1999, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 1-38
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3108504
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"Free spaces" in collective action
FRANCESCA POLLETTA
Columbia University
Good metaphors may be essential to social science. By putting "the

polysemous properties of language in the foreground," they facilitat
what Richard Harvey Brown calls the "genre-stretching" that drive
innovation.1 The danger of a good metaphor, though, is that claims
merely implied are subjected neither to theoretical specification nor
empirical investigation. Evocation substitutes for explanation. This ha
been the case, I argue, in recent discussions of the role of "free spaces
in mobilization. Since Sara Evans used the term in her 1979 Personal
Politics, "free spaces," along with "protected spaces," "safe spaces,"
"spatial preserves," "havens," "sequestered social sites," "cultural labo-
ratories," "spheres of cultural autonomy," and "free social spaces" -
different names for the same thing - have appeared regularly in the
work of sociologists, political scientists, and historians of collective
action.2 For all these writers, free spaces and their analogues refer to
small-scale settings within a community or movement that are removed
from the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily participated
in, and generate the cultural challenge that precedes or accompanies
political mobilization.
The term's appeal is considerable. Not only does it discredit a view of

the powerless as deludedly acquiescent to their domination, since in
free spaces they are able to penetrate and overturn hegemonic beliefs,
but it promises to restore culture to structuralist analyses without slip-
ping into idealism. Counterhegemonic ideas and identities come neither
from outside the system nor from some free-floating oppositional con-
sciousness, but from long-standing community institutions. Free
spaces seem to provide institutional anchor for the cultural challenge
that explodes structural arrangements. Yet the analytic force of the
concept has been blunted by inconsistencies in its definition and usage
and by a deeper failure to grasp the more complex dynamics of mobi-
Theory and Society 28: 1-38, 1999.

? 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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2
lization. How ubiquitous are free spaces? How necessary are they to
mobilization and are they necessary to all movements? What makes
them free? The variety of answers to these questions stems in part from
the term's conflation of several structures that play different roles in
mobilization. That is, a feminist bookshop created by activists in the
American women's liberation movement bore a different relation to
protest than did a book circle in Estonia under Soviet rule.3 I suggest,
therefore, that we disaggregate structures as well as tasks of mobiliza-
tion. The three structures that I identify - transmovement, indigenous,
and prefigurative - can be compared along several dimensions. I argue
that the character of the associational ties that compose them, respec-
tively, extensive, dense/isolated, and symmetrical, helps to explain their
different roles in identifying opportunities, recruiting participants, sup-
plying leaders, and crafting compelling action frames.
This reconceptualization still does not answer to a second set of prob-

lems, which has to do with a tendency to reduce culture to structure, in
spite of the free space concept's promise to integrate the two. This is
most evident in discussions of what I have termed "indigenous" struc-
tures. Opposition is made dependent on the structural characteristics
of the free space (its density and isolation), and on the structural trans-
formations (opportunity or crisis) that turn the challenge nurtured
there into a mobilizing action frame. But that conceptualization
obscures, first, the cultural dimensions of structural transformations
outside the free space and, accordingly, insurgents' capacity to influ-
ence, indeed create, opportunities; and, second, the cultural specificity
of the structures within it. Depending on what meanings are attached
to actual or perceived ties, dense and isolated networks are as likely to
impede protest or limit it to purely local tragets and identities as to
facilitate it. Rather than providing insight into the dynamics by which
such constraints are surmounted, free spaces remain a cultural black
box grafted onto a political opportunity model or a structural break-
down one. Conceptualizing structures as cultural reveals resources
available to insurgents and obstacles facing them that have been over-
looked in analyses of free spaces.
Drawing on two cases whose status as free spaces has become near-
paradigmatic, I demonstrate the yields of such a reconceptualization. I
argue that network intersections are critical to generating mobilizing
identities, not just because weak-tied individuals provide access to
previously unavailable material and informational resources, but be-
cause their social distance endows them with the authority to contest

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existing relations of status and deference among the aggrieved popula-

tion. Thus, I show how rural black Mississippians' interaction with
people they saw as representatives of the national civil rights move-
ment proved important in countering local black elites' reluctance to
engage in militant action. This was true even though the movement
activists to whom they were exposed, namely college-age organizers,
provided neither financial resources, physical protection, nor guarantees
of political success. Similarly, the development of a feminist challenge
within the Southern civil rights movement was made possible by
veterans' contact with white newcomers from Northern activist circles,
whose social distance not only brought new information and ideas, but
enabled them to defy conventions of racial and gender deference. In
both cases, mapping the structural relations without examining the
meanings of those relations is insufficient explanation for the timing
and form of collective action.
Theoretical convergence on the free space concept
In a much-quoted passage, Sara Evans and Harry Boyte write:
Particular sorts of public places in the community, what we call free spaces,
are the environments in which people are able to learn a new self-respect, a
deeper and more assertive group identity, public skills, and values of coopera-
tion and civic virtue. Put simply, free spaces are settings between private lives
and large scale institutions where ordinary citizens can act with dignity,
independence and vision.4
For Evans and Boyte and the scholars who have followed them, the free
space concept shows that the oppressed are not without resources to
combat their oppression. In the dense interactive networks of commun-
ity-based institutions, people envision alternative futures and plot strat-
egies for realizing them. Free spaces supply the activist networks, skills,
and solidarity that assist in launching a movement. They also provide
the conceptual space in which dominated groups are able to penetrate
the prevailing common sense that keeps most people passive in the face
of injustice, and are thus crucial to the very formation of the identities
and interests that precede mobilization. As Eric Hirsch puts it, "Havens
insulate the challenging group from the rationalizing ideologies nor-
mally disseminated by the society's dominant group."5 Free spaces have
included, by Fantasia and Hirsch's count, block clubs, tenant associa-
tions, bars, union halls, student lounges and hangouts, families, women's
consciousness-raising groups, and lesbian feminist communities.6

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The Southern black church, removed from white control and central to
the life of black communities, figures in most surveys of free spaces.
For the emerging civil rights movement it provided meeting places to
develop strategy and commitment, a network of charismatic move-
ment leaders, and an idiom that persuasively joined Constitutional
ideals with Christian ones.7 The Southern civil rights movement itself,
and particularly the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), in another oft-cited example, gave white women the organizing
skills, role models (in effective older women activists), and friendship
connections that were essential to the emergence of radical feminism.
It also gave them the ideological room to begin to question the gap
between male activists' radically egalitarian ethos and their sexist
behavior. "Within the broader social space of the movement," Evans
and Boyte write, "women found a specifically female social space in
which to discuss their experiences, share insights, and find group
strength as they worked in the office or met on the margins of big
meetings."8 Free spaces within movements thus contribute to the
spread of identities, frames, and tactics from one movement to another.
And as "abeyance structures"9 and "halfway houses," 10 they preserve
movement networks and traditions during the "doldrums" of apparent
political consensus. They are "repositories of cultural materials into
which succeeding generations of activists can dip to fashion ideologi-
cally similar, but chronologically separate, movements," as McAdam
puts it.11 As "movement communities," free spaces are an enduring
outcome of protest.12
The free space concept has been appealing to scholars of varying theo-
retical stripe for its recognition of the usually constraining operation of
common sense while refusing the across-the-board mystification of
dominant ideology theses. Counterhegemonic frames come not from
a disembodied oppositional consciousness or pipeline to an extra-
systemic emancipatory truth, but from long-standing community in-
stitutions. Converging with resource mobilization models' attentiveness
to the networks and organizations that precede insurgency, the notion
of free spaces highlights in addition the specifically cultural dimensions
of prior networks.13 It thus seems to provide a much needed concep-
tual bridge between structuralist models' focus on institutional sources
of change and new social movement theorists' interest in challenges
to dominant cultural codes. It recognizes the cultural practices of
subordinate groups (free spaces are often cultural institutions) as
proto- or explicitly political. The free space concept undermines another
well-worn opposition between tradition and radical change. Free spaces

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are often associated with the most traditional institutions: the church
in Southern black communities;14 the family in Algeria and Kuwait;15
nineteenth-century French peasant communities.16 Although under nor-
mal circumstances such institutions are conservative, the rapid social
change that both threatens their existence and puts ancient ambitions
within reach may make of them, as Calhoun puts it, "reactionary radi-
cals." 17 Incorporating institutional and ideational dimensions, tradition
and change, and community and challenge, the free space concept seems
an ideal conceptual tool for probing the foundations of insurgency.
Divergence and ambiguity
Yet what seems like consensus on what the term "free space" means,
refers to, and illuminates conceals a good deal of divergence. What are
free spaces? Authors variously describe them as subcultures, commun-
ities, institutions, organizations, and associations, which are very differ-
ent referents. Evans and Boyte represent them as physical spaces; the
term, they say "suggests strongly an 'objective,' physical dimension -
the ways in which places are organized and connected, fragmented,
and so forth."18 However, Scott maintains that linguistic codes that are
opaque to those in power are as much a free space as is a physical site
of resistance; Farrell says that the 1950s Beat Movement created "free
spaces in print and performance"; Robnett describes the grassroots,
one-on-one recruitment activities that were dominated by women in
the civil rights movement as a "free space," and Gamson calls "cyber-
space" a "safe space."19
Do all oppressed groups have free spaces? Gamson and Scott argue
that only total institutions provide the powerful complete control; all
other regimes of power coexist with spaces of relative autonomy. Fan-
tasia and Hirsch similarly argue that "[t]hese 'free' social spaces or
'havens' have had counterparts wherever dominant and subordinate
groups have coexisted."20 But they go on to suggest that "the avail-
ability and nature of such 'free' spaces play a key role in the success of a
variety of movement mobilization efforts,"21 this implying that free
spaces are not always available. Hirsch reiterates the point: "Successful
recruitment to a revolutionary movement is more likely if there are
social structural-cultural havens available where radical ideas and
tactics can be more easily germinated."22 If not all oppressed groups
possess free spaces, then under what conditions do such sites emerge?
What about free spaces make them free, and free of what? There seems

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to be agreement among the authors I've cited that freedom from the
surveillance of authorities is essential.23 The hush arbors of slaves, bars
in working-class communities, Kuwaiti mosques under Iraqi occupa-
tion: each gave oppressed groups the opportunity to voice their com-
plaints and openly discuss alternatives. On the other hand, federal
prison served as a launching pad for the radical pacifist movement,
according to James Tracy. "In these artificial communities, [WW2 con-
scientious objectors] feverishly exchanged ideas about reforging paci-
fism and experimented with resistance against the microcosm of the
state they had near at hand in their places of internment."24 Whether
free spaces are characterized by ideological freedom is also disputed.
Evans and Boyte, Gamson, Hirsch, and Fantasia and Hirsch argue
that they are; James Scott claims that subordinates' apparent consent
to their domination is everywhere a performance.25 Free spaces offer
people not the opportunity to penetrate the sources of their subordina-
tion, since they are already obvious, but to preserve and build upon a
collective record of resistance. But what about groups that are not
subordinate? They launch movements too, for example, for animal
rights and environmental protection, but presumably lack a "hidden
transcript" of collective resistance. Do they require free spaces?
Small size, intimacy, and the rootedness of free spaces in long-standing

communities seem to be common themes. Evans and Boyte define
them in part "by their roots in community, the dense, rich networks of
daily life."26 Scott writes: "Generally speaking, the smaller and more
intimate the group, the safer the possibilities for free expression."27
And Couto: "When the conditions of repression are paramount and
the possibility of overt resistance is small, narratives are preserved in
the most private of free spaces, the family...."28 But intimacy is no
guarantee of freedom of expression. And as feminist theorists have
long pointed out, the family has been a prime site for the reproduction
of patriarchal relations.29 With respect to free spaces' deep community
roots, this doesn't seem to be the case with movement free spaces,
which are created de novo as a deliberate strategy for freeing up
discussion. In Hirsch's account of community organizing in East New
York, the "havens" within which an oppositional culture developed -
block clubs - were founded by organizers from outside the community.
The block clubs were the movement rather than precursors to it.30 The
Highlander Center, federal prisons, and the Christian Faith and Life
Community within which New Left ideals were developed have each
been labeled free spaces but none can be considered integral to the
daily life of pre-existing communities.31 1960s feminist activist Pam

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Allen is explicit: "It is when we come into a long term relationship with
people with whom we don't associate regularly that the old roles we
play can be set aside for a space in which we can develop ourselves
more fully as whole human beings.... Free Space is free because we do
relate apart from our daily lives." 32
Finally, what are the connections between the counterhegemonic chal-

lenge that is nurtured in free spaces and full-fledged mobilization? For
Evans and Boyte, "Democratic action depends upon these free spaces,
where people experience a schooling in citizenship and learn a vision
of the common good in the course of struggling for change.... Free
spaces are the foundations for such movement countercultures."33
Fantasia and Hirsch argue, by contrast, that the alternative cultures
developed in such sites only become politicized in the context of insur-
gency. For Scott, the cultural practices in free spaces are already
political. However, insurgency is only triggered by a relaxation of sur-
veillance. For Whittier, activists turn to cultural work within free
spaces when direct engagement with the state is no longer possible.34
Are participants in the free space more likely to perceive political
opportunities when they open up? Do leaders within the free space,
for example, ministers or teachers, the local bartender, or conveners
of a consciousness-raising group within a movement, become the
leaders of the (new) movement? Do the institutions within which
opposition is nurtured shape the character of insurgency? And do free
spaces precede the emergence of all movements? Evans's and Boyte's
claim that free spaces are necessary to "democratic action,"35 and
Fisher's that free spaces are "seedbeds for democratic insurgency,"36
suggest their limited applicability. But is there any reason why free
spaces do not play a role in right-wing movements?
It seems clear that by "free space" analysts have something more in

mind than a gathering place that is removed from the direct surveil-
lance of authorities. It is hard to imagine insurgents not finding a
physical space for communication, whether a shadowy alley, a prison
exercise yard, or the internet. And indeed, in several cases the physical
space that analysts refer to doesn't seem to amount to much, for exam-
ple the "margins of big meetings" that Sara Evans identified as a free
space for the development of radical feminism within the New Left, and
the street corner defended against rival gangs that Gamson describes
as a safe space.37 Rather it makes sense to see the free space concepts
as an attempt to capture the social structural dimensions of several
cultural dynamics. We know that cultural practices can express, sus-

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tain, and strengthen oppositional identities and solidarities (especially

at times when repression makes direct claims on the state impossible,
but also when institutionalized understandings of politics exclude issues
and identities as personal, private, or otherwise non-political); that
movements build on prior activist networks, traditions, and know-
how; that pre-existing affective bonds supply the selective incentives
to participate rather than free-ride; and that community institutions
can nurture traditions of opposition to dominant ideologies. However,
the free space concept simply posits a "space" wherein those dynamics
occur, without specifying how, why, and when certain patterns of
relations produce full-scale mobilization rather than accommodation
or unobtrusive resistance. As a first cut at these questions, I propose
that we distinguish three types of associative structures that have been
called free spaces, and specify the ways in which each one is more and
less likely to facilitate key tasks of mobilization. Then I suggest what
such a typology leaves out.
An alternative: Structures of association and preconditions for

mobilization
Transmovement, indigenous, and prefigurative groups38 all operate

within or in sympathy with an aggrieved population and all foster
oppositional practices, whether explicitly political or proto-politically
cultural (see Table 1). I focus here on the character of their associa-
tional ties, both those linking participants and those linking particular
networks to others within a "multiorganizational field,"39 in account-
ing for their differential capacity to identify opportunities, supply
leaders, recruit participants, craft mobilizing action frames, and
fashion new identities, tasks essential to sustained mobilization. Note
that transmovement, indigenous, and prefigurative forms of associa-
tion by no means exhaust the structures that play a role in mobilization.
Most obviously missing are formal movement organizations, along
with counter-movements, third parties (media and funders), and
authorities. I treat only these three because they have been character-
ized as "free spaces" but without the differentiation necessary to iden-
tify the specific resources each provides for mobilization efforts. Note
also that my intention is not to privilege the character of social ties
over their substantive content in accounting for their role in mobiliza-
tion, that is, to privilege structure over culture. I understand culture
as the symbolic dimension of all structures, institutions, and practices
(symbols are signs that have meaning and significance through their

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Table 1. Associative structures in social movements
Structure Character of Role in mobilization Examples

ties
Trans- Extensive Well-equipped to identify Highlander Folk School,

movement ties opportunities. Not well- National Women's
equipped to supply leaders Party, radical pacifists
or mobilizing frames, or to
recruit participants
Indigenous Dense ties, Well-equipped to supply Southern black church,

isolated leaders, local participants, German Turner halls,
network and mobilizing frames; but Estonian literary circles,
not to identify extra-local craft guilds
opportunities or mobilize
extra-local participants
Prefigurative Symmetric Well-equipped to develop "Women's only" spaces,

ties new identities and claims, new social movement
but unless they begin to "autonomous zones,"
provide non-movement "alternative" services
services are difficult to
sustain
interrelations; the pattern of those relations is culture). More on this

follows below.
Transmovement structures are the "halfway houses" described by Aldon

Morris, the "abeyance structures" by Verta Taylor, the "movement
midwives" by Christian Smith, and the "movement mentors" by Bob
Edwards and John McCarthy: the Fellowship of Reconciliation, High-
lander Folk School, and Southern Conference Educational Fund for
the civil rights movememt, the National Women's Party for second wave
feminism, and the American Friends Service Committee and Fellowship
of Reconciliation for the 1980s Central American peace movement.40
They are activist networks characterized by the reach of their ties geo-
graphically, organizationally, and temporally. That is, activists are
linked across a wide geographic area, have contacts in a variety of
organizations and are often veterans of past movements. At the same
time, they are marginal to mainstream American politics.41 Trans-
movement structures can be concentrated in a physical site like the
Highlander Folk School, which trained generations of activists in the
techniques of nonviolence and community organizing. Or they may
consist in a looser cadre of activists, for example, American radical
pacifists who operated in a variety of movement organizations in the

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New Left, anti-Vietnam War, and civil rights movements.42 Either way,
transmovement groups' extensive contacts position them to identify
changes in the structure of political bargaining that indicate the state's
likely vulnerability to movement demands.43 By comparison, locals'
distance from national political elites makes it difficult for them to
identify the splits and alliances that signal new prospects for successful
insurgency.44 Transmovement groups may provide funding for emerging
movements and for activists pursuing militant tactics or a radical
agenda, as well as legal advice and communications contacts.45 They
often train movement leaders in strategies and tactics (as radical pacifists
Glenn Smiley and Bayard Rustin did in honing Dr. King's knowledge
of Gandhian nonviolent resistance).46 On the other hand, transmove-
ment groups are not well-positioned to supply leaders, engage in re-
cruitment drives, or develop resonant mobilizing frames. For the U.S.
Central American peace movement, the "stability and bureaucratic
formality" of groups like the American Friends Service Committee
and the National Council of Churches "seem[ed] to produce a certain
sluggishness that inhibit[ed] the kind of high-intensity organizing
needed to mobilize insurgency," Christian Smith notes.47 In other
cases, the marginal and sometimes prosecuted status of transmove-
ment groups has made them of ambiguous benefit to leaders seeking
to present their movement as "homegrown" and deserving of main-
stream support. Radical pacifists' refusal to bow to movement real-
politik made them at times worrisome wild cards for moderate leaders
in the civil rights, New Left, and anti-Vietnam War movements.48 And
leaders of the African National Congress in the 1950s sought to disso-
ciate themselves publicly from the illegal South African Communist
Party, even as they sought its advice on forming an underground
organization.49 Transmovement groups' marginal position has reduced
the pressure to develop ideological visions with broad appeal (indeed,
members' collective identity may have been preserved by emphasizing
differences with dominant ideologies50). This may result in a sophisti-
cated ideological vision, but one too esoteric or radical for a potential
recruitment base. Even if not seen as subversive, their very longevity
may make them unappealing to a fledgling movement eager to distin-
guish itself from an older generation of activists.51
A second structure often dubbed a free space is indigenous to a com-

munity and initially is not formally oppositional. Indigenous groups
include Southern black churches before the emergence of mass insur-
gency, German Turner halls and anti-temperance societies in nineteenth-
century Chicago, and Kuwaiti mosques during Iraqi occupation.52

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Discussions of these groups have focused on their political, social, and

economic isolation from dominant institutions and the density of their
associational ties. Strongly integrated networks facilitate recruitment
on the basis of pre-existing ties;53 dense horizontal ties and the lack of
ties to groups in power facilitate the development of an oppositional
frame. Thus Hirsch writes, "the lack of positive vertical ties - the lack
of social interaction with upper status groups - makes it more likely
that such groups can be successfully defined as the enemy, which makes
it easier to sustain commitment to revolutionary goals and tactics and
prevents movement participants from developing undue sympathy for
the opponent."54 Craig Calhoun argues similarly that "traditional
communities" have often proved potent revolutionary forces on account
of their distance from outsiders and strongly integrated networks.
These provide the communication resources, solidary incentives, and
commonality of interests necessary to develop a radical challenge.
Normally conservative, members of traditional communities may mo-
bilize when their "interests," that is, their families, friends, customary
crafts, and ways of life, are threatened by rapid social changes or when
such changes "put old goals within reach." 55 Their centrality to people's
daily lives equips indigenous groups to recruit a first wave of partic-
ipants, develop leaders, and formulate mobilizing frames in a familiar
idiom. However, as I noted above, they are not well positioned to
identify the extra-local political shifts and potential allies that provide
important resources for protest. The concentration of ties in indigenous
institutions may make it difficult to mobilize beyond the bounds of the
locality; hence the importance of formal movement organizations in
mass recruitment.56
A third structure often denoted by the term free space is the prefigurative
group created in ongoing movements. These are the "autonomous
zones" of European new social movements, the "women's only spaces"
of 1970s radical feminism, the "block clubs" created by tenant organ-
izers to mobilize an urban constituency, the alternative food co-ops,
health clinics, credit unions, and schools that flourished in the late
1960s and 1970s.57 Explicitly political and oppositional (although their
definition of "politics" may encompass issues usually dismissed as
cultural, personal, or private), they are formed in order to prefigure the
society the movement is seeking to build by modeling relationships that
differ from those characterizing mainstream society.58 Often that means
developing relations characterized by symmetry, that is, reciprocity in
power, influence, and attention.59 I say often, because prefiguration
may sometimes mean modeling relationships with the proper degree

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of deference and authority, not equality.60 My association of prefigura-

tion with symmetric ties simply reflects free space analysts' focus on
left-leaning rather than right-leaning movements (more on that be-
low).61 Prefigurative groups often restrict membership to foster new
interpersonal ties. Thus, by excluding men, women's only spaces
sought to foreground and strengthen the ties among women that were
not yet salient in their everyday lives.62 Since these structures are
created in movements that are already underway, they don't play a
role in identifying the political opportunities that precede mobilization.
However, they help to sustain members' commitment to the cause and
may prove launching pads for "spin-off" organizations or movements
based on new identities and associated claims.63 As a number of authors
have pointed out, prefigurative groups are difficult to sustain, not only
because the requirements of fully egalitarian decisionmaking are diffi-
cult to square with the demands of quick response to environmental
demands, but because in societies characterized by taken-for-granted
assumptions about class, race, gender, expertise, and authority, "social
inequalities can infect deliberations, even in the absence of any formal
exclusions" as Nancy Fraser maintains.64 On the other hand, if they
can provide services (healthcare, food, education) that successfully
compete with mainstream service providers, they may become enduring
indigenous institutions and may supply leaders and participants for
later mobilizations.65
Detailing the patterns of relations that make up each of these structures

and that position them in a multiorganizational field of authorities,
opponents, and allies provides clues to their resources and liabilities for
protest. Transmovement groups' generational, organizational, and geo-
graphic reach helps to explain both their capacity to nurture fledgling
organizations by making available financial, technical, and legal ad-
vice and their weaker capacity for mass recruitment. The density of
relations in indigenous groups affords incentives to participate even in
high-risk activism while the concentration of such ties impedes wide
mobilization. Prefigurative groups' insistence on symmetrical ties throws
into relief the asymmetries of conventional relations and model alter-
natives, but also undercuts the groups' prospects for survival. It seems
clear, then, that while physical settings are important to establish or
reaffirm social relationships, it is the relationships themselves rather
than the physical sites that are important in explaining their role in
mobilization.

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But there is more to it than that. Analyzing these structures apart from
the normative commitments, both explicit and implicit, that animate
them provides inadequate account of their roles in protest. The place
of culture is obvious in the case of prefigurative groups, where the
institutionalization of symmetric relations reflects beliefs about
equality and the proper relationship between means and ends in social
movements. But explicit normative commitments and taken for granted
cultural understandings are just as important to the other two struc-
tures. Not all groups with long-standing and extensive political ties
support new movements: the National Council of Churches, for exam-
ple, only began to assist civil rights and migrant farmworker activists
after the rise of a modernist ideology of social change activism.6 No
one sees the Boy Scouts as a movement halfway house, although this is
a group with extensive ties and, as a social organization, is removed
from mainstream American political institutions. Likewise, indigenous
groups' capacity to nurture opposition is often a function of institu-
tionalized normative principles, which permit religious, familial, and
educational groups some degree of autonomy from state interven-
tion.67 And dense ties are as likely to discourage collective action or
limit it to purely local targets as to generate broad insurgency. As
Roger Gould asks, "What aspect of a dispute over grazing rights with
a local landlord would suggest to the peasants of a pastoral village that
their conflict was a single instantiation of a broader struggle between
'the peasantry' and 'the nobility?' "68 The existence of an indigenous
structure (a church, a guild, a civic association) is not enough to
explain how threats, antagonisms, or opportunities come to be per-
ceived in terms of mobilizing identities and interests.
The problem with discussions of free spaces is not only, then, that their
conflation of transmovement, indigenous, and prefigurative structures
has obscured the different roles that each is likely to play in mobiliza-
tion. Despite their claim to integrate culture and structure, discussions
of free spaces have tended to reduce culture to structure. By attributing
alternative or oppositional cultural practices simply to the existence
of dense and isolated structural ties, free space arguments miss the
possibility that dense ties may not generate oppositional ideas and
identities, and that weak ties may. By attributing full-fledged insur-
gency to the political (structural) opportunities that make oppositional
cultures mobilizing, free space arguments miss the possibility that
people may use an oppositional culture to create political opportunities.
I discuss the latter first, drawing on some of the most sophisticated
accounts of free spaces to highlight problems common to many.

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14
One: Culture and "structural" opportunities
In their discussion of what they call "havens," "liberated zones," "pre-

serves," and "'free' social spaces," Fantasia and Hirsch argue that
while subordinate groups are able to "question the rationalizing ideol-
ogies of the dominant order, develop alternative meanings, [and] iron
out their differences" in these settings, it is "the context of acute social
andpolitical crisis that provides the key fulcrum for the transformation
of traditional cultural forms" into overt opposition.69 And again, "we
would emphasize that the extent to which culture is transformed in
collective action depends not only on the availability of social and
spatial 'preserves' within which traditional forms may be collectively
re-negotiated but also, and more importantly, on a level of social
conflict that forces participants outside the daily round of everyday
activity."70 These formulations suggest that free spaces play only a
minimal role in igniting insurgency, since culture within the free space
is, if oppositional, then not mobilizing until the "crisis" that reorients
the meaning of traditional practices.7
Contrary to Fantasia and Hirsch, James Scott sees subordinated

groups, whether outside sequestered social sites or within them, as
unswayed by the ideological blandishments of the powerful. Rejecting
even a thin hegemony argument, which holds that people acquiesce to
their domination because they take it as inevitable (rather than as
right), Scott argues that what usually prevents utopian longings and
an "infrapolitics of dissent" from being translated into overt defiance
is simply the likelihood of severe repression. "Any relaxation in sur-
veillance and punishment, and foot-dragging threatens to become a
declared strike, folktales of oblique aggression threaten to become
face-to-face defiant contempt, millennial dreams threaten to become
revolutionary politics." 72 Indeed, "[a]s soon as the opportunity presents
itself," apparent passivity turns to rebellion.73 Powerless people don't
require free spaces to recognize the injustice of their situation. What
free spaces do provide is the opportunity to articulate safely "the asser-
tion, aggression, and hostility that is thwarted by the on-stage power
of the dominant," 74 to plot alternatives, and to test the limits of official
power. For Scott, like Fantasia and Hirsch, the hidden transcripts
developed in free spaces do not ignite overt protest. Rather, objective
political opportunities are created remote from the agency of the op-
pressed. The oppressed, however, are always alert to potential chinks
in the repressive armor of authorities and move quickly to take advant-
age of them.

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The problem with these accounts of mobilization is their privileging of

structural change outside the free space over the cultural framing that
takes place within it. Cultural challenge is effective only when social,
political, and economic structures have become unstable, that is, when
repression has been relaxed,75 when political realignments have cre-
ated a "structural potential" for mobilization,76 or when a structural
"crisis" has bankrupted old ideas and made people receptive to new
ones.77 But these formulations raise thorny questions. Aren't political
and economic structures themselves shaped by cultural traditions and
assumptions? And can't social movements contribute to destabilizing
the institutional logics that inform everyday life? As Gamson and
Meyer point out, differing political opportunity structures reflect not
just different political systems, for example limits on the executive
branch and a system of checks and balances, but also different public
conceptions of the proper scope and role of the state.78 "State policies
are not only technical solutions to material problems of control or
resource extraction," Friedland and Alford argue in the same vein.
"They are rooted in changing conceptions of what the state is, what it
can and should do."79 Such conceptions extend to state-makers and
managers who, like challengers, are suspended in webs of meaning.80
Whether elections "open" or "close" political opportunities surely has
to do with whether elections have historically been catalysts to collective
action and whether there exists an institutional "collective memory" of
state-targeted protest. Something as ostensibly non-cultural as a state's
repressive capacity reflects not only numbers of soldiers and guns but
the strength of constitutional provisions for their use and traditions of
military allegiance. In her discussion of protest policing, Donatella
della Porta observes that while the West German police "views itself
as a part of a normative order that accepts the rule of the law," the
Italian police "since the creation of the Italian state had been accus-
tomed to seeing itself as the longa manus of the executive power, and
thus put preservation of law and order before the control of crime."
These views in turn shaped the opportunities for different forms of
protest.81 Note that some of the above, for example, state officials'
ideological assumptions, may exercise only transient or weak influence
over a structure of political opportunities; others, for example, state
legitimacy, may have stronger effect, be less malleable, and still others,
say, conventions of political commemoration, may be somewhere in
between.82 Movements themselves can create political opportunities
by changing widespread beliefs.83 For example, a movement may be
responsible for lowering the level of state repression that is considered
legitimate and that can therefore be deployed against subsequent in-

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surgencies.84 A culture/structure dichotomy obscures the many instan-

ces in which people have seen opportunities where "objectively" there
were none.85
Scott seems to be making just this point - and retreating from the
sharp separation of structure (opportunities) and (mobilizing) culture
that he posits elsewhere - when he writes:
An objectivist view would ... have us assume that the determination of the
power of the dominant is a straightforward matter, rather like reading an
accurate pressure gauge. We have seen, however, that estimating the inten-
tions and power of the dominant is a social process of interpretation highly
infused with desires and fears. How else can we explain the numerous instan-
ces in which the smallest shards of evidence - a speech, a rumor, a natural
sign, a hint of reform - have been taken by slaves, untouchables, serfs, and
peasants as a sign that their emancipation is at hand or that their adversaries
are ready to capitulate?86
Scott goes on to pose the "central issue" as what Barrington Moore

calls "the conquest of inevitability." "So long as a structure of domi-
nation is viewed as inevitable and irreversible, then all 'rational' oppo-
sition will take the form of infrapolitics: resistance that avoids any
open declaration of its intention."87 But he has already acknowledged
that unobtrusive resistance has less potential for change than overt
defiance ("No matter how elaborate the hidden transcript may be-
come, it always remains a substitute for an act of assertion directly in
the face of power"88). And if what stands in the way of engaging in
such overt politics is a perception of the "inevitability" of the existing,
then isn't this precisely the "thin" theory of hegemony that he earlier
dismissed? Despite his claims to the contrary, Scott ends up shifting
between the objectivism he derides and a reliance on false conscious-
ness to explain people's failure to mobilize.
An alternative, following Sewell, is to conceptualize structures as cul-

tural schemas invested with and sustaining resources, in other words,
schemas that reflect and reproduce unevenly distributed power.89 This
helps to explain structures' durability and their transformation. It is
not that they bring about their own mutation - not that they have
agency - but that they are invested with meanings that afford resources
for insurgents challenging them. People can "transpose schemas" from
one setting to another, can turn the worker solidarity fostered by
capitalist production, for example, into a force for radical action.
Sewell's scheme gives people more power to capitalize on minimal

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opportunities by framing conditions in a way that makes collective

action possible or necessary. Unlike free space analyses' tendency to
dichotomize culture and structure (with culture inside the free space
and structure outside it), it reveals overlooked resources for mobiliza-
tion.
It also reveals, contrarily, overlooked cultural obstacles to protest.

Activists' vocabularies of protest are shaped and limited by ostensibly
non-cultural political, economic, and legal structures. For example, to
understand the currency of an "individual rights" frame, as compared
to a "human rights" frame or a class-based frame, one would have to
understand the legal and political traditions, systems, and rules through
which those terms have become meaningful. Tarrow notes that "the
French labor movement embraced an associational 'vocabulary' that
reflected the loi le Chapelier, while American movements developed a
vocabulary of 'rights' that reflected the importance of the law in Amer-
ican institutions and practice."90 Popular conceptions of "equality,"
"personhood," and "problem" are shaped by dominant legal institu-
tions.91 Neo-institutionalist theories of organization should alert us
to the institutional shaping of movement forms, and indeed, to the
historical and cultural preeminence of the organization as a means of
protest.92
To get at these resources and constraints requires that we abandon a

set of binary oppositions that have underpinned and undermined recent
efforts to integrate culture into accounts of mobilization, including but
extending beyond discussions of free spaces. Thus "cultural," "subjec-
tive," and "malleable" have been opposed to "structural," "objective,"
and "durable." Free space discussions have rendered that set of opposi-
tions spatial: culture is restricted to the free space, structure to relations
outside it.93 As a result, they have underestimated continuities between
the two, have ignored the cultural traditions, institutional memories,
and political taboos that structure politics and that can be used by
insurgents to strategic effect, and have ignored how cultural under-
standings of organization, rationality, legality, and agency constrain
insurgents' strategic decisionmaking. In other words, discussions of free
spaces have simultaneously underestimated the durability of culture
and the malleability of structure.

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Two: Culture and "structural" ties
In his review of Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Charles

Tilly asks an interesting question: Why is there only one hidden tran-
script for each subordinated group? Why not as many transcripts as
subordinated individuals? Indeed, "why not ten, twenty, a hundred as
many discourses as subordinates?" Scott's argument "requires that
each subordinated population produce a unitary and shared hidden
transcript.... Don't subordinates ever resist the hidden transcript?
Scott supplies no answers."94
Actually, Scott does provide an answer, but a misleading one. "Social

spaces of relative autonomy do not merely provide a neutral medium
within which practical and discursive negations may grow. As domains
of power relations in their own right, they serve to discipline as well as
to formulate patterns of resistance."95 And again: "the hidden transcript
is a social product and hence a result of power relations among subordi-
nates."96 Yet when he describes the process by which a single, coherent
transcript is pieced together from multiple negations, the power relations
he just identified drop out. "In this hypothetical progression from 'raw'
anger to what we might call 'cooked' indignation, sentiments that are
idiosyncratic, unrepresentative, or have only weak resonance within
the group are likely to be selected against or censored.... The essential
point is that a resistant subculture or countermores among subordi-
nates is necessarily a product of mutuality." 97 In other words, the oppo-
sitional frame that is developed within the free space is uninfluenced by
relations of power, authority, and deference within the group.
What that misses, of course, are the ways in which densely-structured

relations within dominated groups foreclose as well as enable certain
kinds of challenge depending on the normative content of those ties.
By making oppositional identities and meanings a function of the
existence of dense ties within isolated networks, analyses of free spaces
have minimized culture's analytically independent role within free
spaces as well as outside them. By contrast, I argue that culture oper-
ates in the formal ideologies enacted in the community institutions
labeled free spaces - the church, the union, the civic association - and
in the behavioral expectations associated with, indeed constituting, ties
of kinship, neighborhood, and contract.
To illustrate, I turn to Eric Hirsch's rich account of working-class

mobilization in nineteenth-century Chicago.98 Hirsch argues that Ger-

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man workers launched a revolutionary movement while Irish and

Anglo-American workers did not in part because Germans possessed
"havens" or "free social spaces." The "structural isolation from ruling
groups [of these settings] ... allowed subordinate groups to develop
innovative ideas about the nature of the system, to identify those
responsible for the subordinate groups' plight, and to discover what
action was needed to resolve their common problems."99 But there is
no reason that sheer isolation will guarantee the replacement of a
dominant ideology with an action-mobilizing injustice frame (and
physical proximity, at least, has not prevented people from penetrating
the ideologies propounded by those in power, as Judith Rollins showed
in her study of domestic workers0l?). In fact, Hirsch's historical ac-
count reveals that whereas German workers' exposure to anarchist and
socialist ideas in Turner halls, anti-temperance meetings, and anar-
chist-sponsored picnics made them receptive to a revolutionary inter-
pretation of their exploitation, exploited Irish workers tended to accept
an Anglo-American ideology of individual success and accordingly to
reject the idea of working-class mobilization. Irish workers had havens
too, most importantly the Catholic Church, but the Church's animosity
to radical thought, along with Irish nationalist organizations' focus on
the Irish/British conflict overseas, led Irish workers to blame their
troubles on their lack of skills, and to attribute their lack of skills to
Britain's underdevelopment of Ireland.101 Hirsch's historical analysis,
contrary to his theoretical brief, suggests that the mobilizing power of
havens lies not just in their structural isolation but in their specific
cultural content. Or, better put, that it was the combination of dense
networks and the availability of a radical cultural idiom that was
responsible for the revolutionary character of German mobilization.
The story that Hirsch tells (as distinct from the way he theorizes it), is
not exceptional. Other accounts have shown how insurgency is shaped
by the institutions within which it develops. For example, Doug Rossi-
now characterizes as a "free space" the Christian Faith and Life Com-
munity (CFLC) on the University of Texas campus in the late 1950s, a
group that produced leading activists of the white student left. "It was a
'free space' where, as one student said, he felt the 'freedom to talk
about my questions' - questions of self, of God and of life.... [It]
prepared students to take political action in defiance of established
power."102 Yet, Rossinow shows that what motivated members to plan
sit-ins and pickets against segregated facilities was the Christian exis-
tentialism they absorbed in the CFLC, and particularly its emphasis on
achieving a spiritual "breakthrough" via political engagement rather

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than personal reflection.103 It was not just the "safe haven"104 provided
by the CFLC, but the particular cultural frames institutionalized within
it that inspired the students. Similarly, Mary Ann Tetreault shows that
the mosque played a crucial role in Kuwaiti opposition to Iraqi occu-
pation not just because it was one of the few associations that was not
repressed, but because of its long-standing and "morally unassailable"
authority to challenge the state.105 The importance of the cultural
frames associated with particular institutions is obscured by a view of
free spaces as defined solely by social distance between powerful and
powerless. People's physical or social separation from mainstream
institutions doesn't guarantee the emergence of a mobilizing collective
action frame. What is crucial is the set of beliefs, values, and symbols
institutionalized in a particular setting.
It would be a mistake, however, to see culture only as the ideologies

enacted in community institutions rather than also as the basis for the
very ties that make up the community.106 With respect to free space
analysts' claim that dense and isolated networks facilitate protest, it is
just as likely that, depending on the circumstances, such networks may
impede protest. This is partly because the absence of ties to outsiders
may lead aggrieved people to interpret threats and conflicts in purely
local terms, as Roger Gould points out, rather than in terms of the
broader identities and ideologies that are necessary to mass mobiliza-
tion.107 Gould argues that the development of mobilizing identities
requires significant interaction across communities, in other words,
that social ties determine the scale as well as content of collective
identities. But the same ties may, depending on the circumstances,
favor very different or contradictory behaviors. Neighborhood ties may
promote competition rather than mutuality.'08 Business ties may pro-
mote solidarity but also deference. As Allan Silver shows, friendship in
eighteenth-century Europe carried different behavioral prescriptions
than it does today.109 The point is that the behaviors expected of and
imputed to patterned relations are multiple and variable."? Thus,
strong ties may impede mobilization."' And weak ties may facilitate
it, not only because they provide access to people and resources out-
side the community, but because potential insurgents may grant
"known strangers" the authority to challenge the bonds of authority
and deference within the community that have kept people from overt
defiance.
My point, then, is that while it makes sense to pay attention to the

structure of relationships that supply resources for various mobiliza-

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tion tasks, we can strengthen that investigation in several ways: by

recognizing that ties can impede mobilization as well as foster it; by
recognizing a greater range of network dynamics, that is, the role of
weak ties, network holes, conflicts, and intersections;112 and by identi-
fying the fuller range of behavioral prescriptions associated with par-
ticular ties. In the following, I don't attempt the full investigation I
have in mind, but do review two cases that are frequently cited as free
spaces: the black church for the civil rights movement, and the student
wing of the civil rights movement for radical feminism."13 Rather than
characterizing each one as a space in which the constraints exercised
by structure were somehow suspended, I identify behavioral expect-
ations that constrained mobilization by African-Americans in South-
ern communities and by feminists within the civil rights movement,
and then show how they were overcome. In each case, I find that
network intersections generated mobilizing identities, but not only be-
cause weak ties to other networks (in the first case the national civil
rights movement, in the other Northern left circles) provided material
or informational resources that were previously lacking. Rather, their
social distance and social status endowed local members of those
networks with the power to challenge the relations of authority and
deference that operated among members of the aggrieved group.
Without detracting from the vitally important role of Southern black

churches in nurturing and sustaining Southern civil rights protest,
evidence suggests that in many Southern communities, particularly
rural ones, black ministers were not the shock troops of the struggle.
Field reports by student organizers in the early 1960s make clear that
many ministers were reluctant converts to the cause.114 Ministers'
timidity often stemmed from their financial dependence on whites:
whereas in Southern cities, ministers' livelihoods came entirely from
their parishioners, in rural areas most were forced to work part time
for whites and were therefore more vulnerable to economic reprisals.
In addition, some church leaders enjoyed positions of brokerage with
powerful whites, and were compensated in some fashion for serving as
advocates of only moderate reform. These stakes were threatened by
the development of new leaders, whether student organizers or black
residents.
"Outsiders" proved important in overcoming those barriers to radical

action. The resources possessed by student organizers who moved into
rural areas in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the early 1960s are
not readily apparent. With neither federal backing nor the capacity to

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22
furnish physical or financial protection, organizers could offer resi-

dents little in the way of material incentive to participate. Their arrival
was often met with stepped-up white violence against black residents.
Yet, organizers were seen as representatives of a national movement
and were often called "freedom riders" long after the freedom rides
had ended. Perhaps some residents believed that the organizers' pres-
ence signaled the government's willingness to intervene, but my review
of field reports, testimony at mass meetings, and interviews with for-
mer organizers suggests that other rationales were operating. The
young organizers were putting their lives on the line, were willing to
die for black Mississippians' freedom, locals often reminded each other.
How could they not participate? The rationale was one of obligation
more than opportunity, and it was the organizers' outsider status, the
distance they came, that authorized their calls to participate.115
Georg Simmel described the "stranger" as combining "distance and

nearness, indifference and involvement." Strangers "are not really con-
ceived as individuals," but this does not mean that they are marginal or
powerless. To the contrary, Simmel observed, the stranger often enjoys
a position of influence by virtue of his "free[dom] from entanglement"
in existing interests and cleavages.116 This seems to have been the case
with Southern student organizers. Their intimate involvement in the
life of Mississippi black communities made them trustworthy, while
their outsider status enabled them to challenge the relations of defer-
ence that impeded militant collective action. Former SNCC activist
Hollis Watkins remembers that several organizers had begun seminary
training and others, like Watkins himself, were well-versed in scripture
and skilled orators. Some ministers may have come around to support-
ing the movement, Watkins suspects, because they believed that the
SNCC organizers were ministers, whose popularity with the local
people made them a threat to their jobs. This is an example of how the
very weakness of informational ties facilitated mobilization.117 A view of
free spaces as untrammeled by relations of power and authority misses
in this case both the constraints on mobilization and the dynamics by
which they were overcome. Categorical classification of actors as
black, white, or middle class would miss the networks crosscutting
those categories, which proved more salient to people's decision to
participate, or to oppose participation, than categorical "interests."
Southern ministers who were initially wary often did come around to
supporting and, indeed, leading the struggle. It seems that the most
successful organizers managed to persuade, cajole, or help residents to

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push traditional leaders into an active role rather than circumventing

them altogether.118 Thus a Holly Springs organizer reported happily in
1963, "The image of students knocking on doors, the fact of their
speaking at churches on Sundays, and the threat of demonstration
have served to build respect for them and has challenged the local
ministers no end. They see this and are beginning to work to try to
build their images and redeem themselves.""119 Outsiders didn't em-
power a powerless group, or enlighten the falsely conscious, but they
did undermine the structured relations within the group that channeled
resistance in a conservative direction.120
Contrary to historical accounts - Sara Evans's (1979) seminal piece and

the host that have followed her121 - it seems that outsiders, or weak-
tied individuals, were also crucial in the emergence of a feminist chal-
lenge within SNCC. In November 1964, a position paper on sexism in
the movement was floated anonymously at a SNCC staff retreat. Evans
attributed the paper to two white SNCC veterans: Casey Hayden, who
had been involved with SNCC since its founding in 1960, and Mary
King, who joined in 1962. On Evans's account, Hayden and King's
conversations with other women about their second-class status in the
movement and discussions of the writings of de Beauvoir, Lessing, and
Friedan culminated in their decision to bring up the issue with the
SNCC staff. The paper they wrote documented a range of sexist prac-
tices - women relegated to minute-taking duties, rarely given projects
to direct, never made SNCC spokespeople - and called on the group to
extend its egalitarian commitment to women. For Evans and subse-
quent chroniclers, the fact that the memo was written by longtime
SNCCers suggested that in spite of their circumscribed role as women,
Hayden and King had the freedom to explore this "new" source of
oppression, to toy with unconventional ideas and experiment with
new roles. It suggested that SNCC was indeed a kind of cultural
laboratory for radical ideas, a "free space." A year after the first memo
was met with the laughter and derision they had anticipated, Evans
goes on, King and Hayden collaborated on a second memo, directed to
black and white women active in the civil rights and New Left move-
ments. Its effect, by all accounts, was galvanizing, and spurred women
to build the networks and consciousness-raising groups that would
eventually explode into radical feminism.
In fact, new testimony suggests that a larger group, including several

Northern white women who had only recently joined SNCC, wrote the
first anonymous memo in November 1964.122 These women occupied a

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24
curious position: they became part of SNCC's inner circle almost upon
their arrival in Mississippi because SNCC was so shorthanded on the
eve of the massive summer project it was planning, but they lacked the
bonds of long friendship that united veteran members of the group.
Active in other movements here and abroad, they brought a "Northern"
aggressiveness that enabled them to defy not only the group loyalty that
made criticism difficult, but also the norms of deference that struc-
tured white women's relations to the mainly black men who headed
SNCC. Taking meeting minutes, not seeking the higher status job of
field organizer, not competing for the public limelight; white women
veterans understood these as choices, made because they were unwill-
ing to endanger black residents by serving as field organizers, but also
because they saw the movement as properly led by black men. It was
easier for women who were longtime members of the group to see an
auxiliary role as consonant with the group's radically egalitarian ethos.
And it was easier for women whose ties to the close-knit SNCC cadre
were weaker to name that role as inequality. Again, network overlaps
not only provided access to new sources of information and new
procedural norms, but gave license to contest long-standing bonds of
friendship and shared political commitment.
Views of indigenous structures as providing only resources for mobi-

lization and not constraints preclude analysis of how mobilizing iden-
tities and interests are shaped by the culture-structures within which
grievances are framed, and by the networks that provide and limit
access to power, information, and authority. Rather than seeing a
single subordinate group or community, with a single set of interests,
free space, and "hidden transcript," 123 we should examine the multiple
networks, some extending beyond the bounds of the locality, which
generate distinct, often conflicting, interests and identities. Thus, in
the case of Southern civil rights organizing, we see how the connec-
tions of some black ministers to white elites discouraged their adopting
a militant stance, this in spite of their prior commitment to reform.
A second important line of inquiry would explore the effects of differ-

ent kinds and strengths of social relations.124 Rather than assuming
that protest requires dense ties, we should investigate where and when
dense ties constrain action and "weak" ones facilitate it. The latter
point is reflected in the role of "outsiders" in both cases of mobiliza-
tion that I described. Mississippi civil rights workers' combination of
intimacy and distance gave them the capacity to defy structured rela-
tions within black communities, this in spite of their lack of access to

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25
material or political institutional resources. Similarly, the white women

who were fairly new to SNCC when they catalyzed a feminist challenge
were in overlapping networks: a Southern black movement and a
Northern white one. Their marginal position in the former, with access
to the inner core of decisionmakers but without close bonds to them,
made it easier, and more acceptable, for them to refuse the more defer-
ential role played by white women veterans. These examples also show
the intersection of the cultural and structural dimensions of networks.
Outsiders' scope of action had to do not with the actual resources they
brought to bear, but with those imputed to them, and with cultural
understandings of intimacy and remoteness, of the boundaries of the
group, and of the range of the sayable.
Conclusion
One of the chief analytic payoffs of the free space concept was to have
been its capacity to integrate culture into structuralist models of collec-
tive action. I argue that, so far, such analyses have not taken adequate
measure of the multiple and contrary dimensions of the culture/struc-
ture relationship. Fuller specification of that relationship alerts us both
to the greater capacities of cultural challenge to destabilize institutional
arrangements and, at the same time, to the obstacles that stand between
cultural challenge and full-fledged mobilization.
Rather than continue to rely on the ambiguous "free spaces" concept, I

have argued that we should explore how the form and substance of
associational ties in different contexts shape the emergence of mobi-
lizing identities. Physical gathering places may build on those ties by
demonstrating the co-presence of others, thus showing people that
issues they thought taboo can be discussed, and strengthening collec-
tive identity by providing tangible evidence of the existence of a group.
However, it is the character of the ties that are established or reinforced
in those settings, rather than the physical space itself, that the free
space concept has sometimes successfully captured. Networks predat-
ing movements, as resource mobilization theorists have long noted, are
critical in supplying the personnel, resources, and tactical expertise
necessary to mobilization.125 They are also important in fostering and
impeding the very identities and interests on the basis of which mobi-
lization is mounted.

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26
To begin to illuminate those dynamics, I have disaggregated the struc-

tures that are more and less equipped to identify opportunities, recruit
participants, develop leaders, generate collective action frames, and
fashion new identities. The typology of transmovement, indigenous,
and prefigurative structures that I have introduced is preliminary but it
should alert us to the different kinds of resources and constraints levied
by different kinds of ties, respectively, extensive, dense, and symmet-
rical. In analyzing indigenous networks' role in developing mobilizing
identities, where the need for something like the free space concept is
most apparent, I have argued for attention to the ways in which pre-
existing network ties militate against the formation of mobilizing iden-
tities, and the dynamics by which such constraints are surmounted.
One such dynamic is the network intersections that provide an ag-
grieved population new access not only to physical, financial, and
communicative resources, but also to people whose only weak ties and
consequent social distance and status enable them to challenge existing
relations of deference. There are other such dynamics. Specifying them
enables us to understand the conditions in which cultural challenge
explodes structured relations, without reducing those conditions to
structural voids.
Acknowledgments
Research was supported by a Columbia University Social Sciences

Faculty Grant. I presented a version of this article at the American
Sociological Association Meeting in Toronto in August 1997. For val-
uable comments on previous drafts, my thanks to William Gamson,
Todd Gitlin, Stephen Hart, James Jasper, Paul Lichterman, David
Meyer, Kelly Moore, John Skrentny, Marc Steinberg, Charles Tilly,
and the Editors of Theory and Society. Thanks also to Linda Catalano
for research assistance.
Notes
1. Richard Harvey Brown, "Social science and the poetics of public truth," Sociological
Forum 5 (1990), 57-58.
2. Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Harry C. Boyte
used the term in his 1972 article, "The textile industry: Keel of southern industrial-
ization," Radical America (March-April), and it is central in Evans and Boyte's
Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (New York: Harper
and Row, 1986). Others who have used the term "free spaces" include Robert

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27
Couto, "Narrative, free space, and political leadership in social movements," The
Journal of Politics 55 (1993): 57-79; Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neigh-
borhood Organizing in America, Updated Edition (New York: Twayne, 1994);
William A. Gamson, "Commitment and agency in social movements," Sociological
Forum 6/1 (1991): 27-50; Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in
the Information Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Aldon Morris,
The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for
Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?
African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997); Doug Rossinow, "'The break-through to new
life': Christianity and the emergence of the new left in Austin, Texas, 1956-1964,"
American Quarterly 46/3 (1994): 309-340; Randy Stoecker, Defending Community
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement:
Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics, second edition (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998); Nancy Whittier, Feminist Generations: The
Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1995). On "havens," see Eric Hirsch, "Protest movements and urban theory,"
Research in Urban Sociology 3 (1993): 159-180; on "spatial preserves," see Rick
Fantasia and Eric L. Hirsch, "Culture in rebellion: The appropriation and trans-
formation of the veil in the Algerian revolution," in Hank Johnston and Bert
Klandermans, editors, Social Movements and Culture (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), 144-162; on "free social spaces," see Robert Fisher and
Joseph Kling, "Leading the people: Two approaches to the role of ideology in
community organizing" in Joseph Kling and Prudence S. Posner, editors, Dilemmas
ofActivism: Class, Community, and the Politics of Local Mobilization (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1990), 71-90; on "safe spaces," see William Gamson, "Safe
spaces and social movements," Perspectives on Social Problems 8 (1996): 27-38; on
"cultural laboratories," see Carol McClurg Mueller, "Conflict networks and the
origins of women's liberation," in Enrique Larania, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R.
Gusfield, editors, New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1994), 234-263; on "spheres of cultural autonomy," see
Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, "Analytical approaches to social movement cul-
ture: The culture of the women's movement," in Hank Johnston and Bert Klander-
mans, editors, Social Movements and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1995), 163-187; on "sequestered social sites," see James Scott, Domina-
tion and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); on "social
spaces," see Craig Calhoun, "The radicalism of tradition: Community strength or
venerable disguise and borrowed language?" American Journal of Sociology 88
(1983): 886-914; on "protected spaces," see Mary Ann Tetreault, "Civil society in
Kuwait: Protected spaces and women's rights," Middle East Journal 47/2 (1993):
275-291. Since almost every one of these authors cites Evans and Boyte's book, and
none distinguishes explicitly between "free spaces" and the term they prefer, I suspect
that the rationale for the use of different terms is simply to inflect the concept with
a particular emphasis, for example, the safety of such spaces, or the predominately
cultural activities that are pursued here.
3. On feminist counter-institutions, see Whittier, Feminist Generations. On Estonian
resistance, see Hank Johnston, "Mobilization and structure of opposition in repres-
sive states," paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual
Meetings (1996).
4. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 17. The passage is quoted in Couto, "Narative," 59;

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28
Aldon Morris, "Centuries of black protest: Its significance for America and the
world," in Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, editors, Race in America (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 27; Hirsch, Urban Revolt, 214; Gamson,
"Safe spaces," 29; Tarrow, Power in Movement, 147; and Stoecker, Defending
Community, 57.
5. Hirsch, Urban Revolt, 206; see also Mueller, "Conflict networks"; Verta Taylor,
"Social movement continuity: The women's movement in abeyance," American
Sociological Review 54 (1989): 761-775; Gamson, "Commitment and agency";
Debra Friedman and Doug McAdam, "Collective identity and activism: Networks,
choices and the life of a social movement," 156-173, in Aldon D. Morris and Carol
McClurg Mueller, editors, Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (New Haven: Yale
Universsity Press, 1992).
6. Fantasia and Hirsch, "Culture in rebellion."
7. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces.
8. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 102; see also Evans, Personal Politics; Alice Echols,
Daring to Be Bad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Doug
McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties. Years
of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987).
9. Taylor, "Social Movement Continuity."
10. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement.
11. McAdam, "Culture and Social Movements," 43.
12. Steven M. Buechler, Women's Movements in the United States (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1990); Taylor and Whittier, "Analytical approaches." See
also Couto, "Narrative"; Stoecker, Defending Community; and James J. Farrell,
The Spirit of the Sixties: Making Postwar Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1997).
13. McAdam, "Culture and Social Movements."
14. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; McAdam, Political Process and
the Development of Black Insurgency; Evans, Personal Politics; Evans and Boyte,
Free Spaces.
15. Fantasia and Hirsch, "Culture in rebellion"; and Tetreault, "Civil society in Kuwait."
16. Calhoun, "The radicalism of tradition."
17. Ibid.
18. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 18. See also Stoecker, Defending Community;
Fantasia and Hirsch, "Culture in rebellion"; and Tetreault, "Civil society."
19. Scott, Domination; Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties, 54; Robnett, How Long?;
Gamson, "Safe spaces."
20. Fantasia and Hirsch, "Culture in Rebellion," 157.
21. Ibid., 159; my emphasis.
22. Hirsch, Urban Revolt, 216; my emphasis.
23. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces; Fantasia and Hirsch, "Culture in rebellion";
Hirsch, Urban Revolt; Scott, Domination; Eric Hirsch, "Protest movements and
urban theory," Research in Urban Sociology 3 (1993); 159-180; Farrell, The Spirit
of the Sixties; Tetreault, "Civil society in Kuwait."
24. James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical Pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago
Seven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 13.
25. See also Couto, "Narrative"; and Morris, "Centuries of black protest." Gamson
points out, however, that it is the rare movement organization that permits com-
plete freedom of dissent: "Social movement organizations will often consider
caucuses a direct threat to the unity that challengers need to succeed against a

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29
formidable antagonist. This often extends beyond formal caucuses to include any
attempted meeting by a restricted subset of participants." "Safe spaces and social
movements," 30. More on this below.
26. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 20; see also Fisher, Let the People Decide.
27. Scott, Domination, 223.
28. Couto, "Narrative," 77.
29. See also Gamson, "Safe spaces."
30. Hirsch, "Protest movements." See also the discussion of "freedom schools" as free
spaces in Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties.
31. Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Tracy, Direct Action; Rossinow,
"'The breakthrough to new life."'
32. Pamela Allen, Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women's Liberation
(New York: Times Change Press, 1970).
33. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 18-20. The foregoing passage in fact seems to
suggest both that free spaces precede social movements and that they are created
by social movements, a dual role reflected in other statements in the book but
never theorized explicitly. If free spaces are sometimes created by social move-
ments, does that mean that they are not necessary to movements' formation?
34. Whittier, Feminist Generations.
35. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces, 18; my emphasis.
36. Fisher, Let the People Decide, 221; my emphasis.
37. Evans, Personal Politics; Gamson, "Safe spaces."
38. I use the term "group" occasionally to describe these structures, but in its minimal
sense as "a number of individuals assembled together or having some unifying
relationship," Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C.
Merriam, 1977). As Chuck Tilly points out to me, the term risks conveying a sense
of solidarity, connectedness, and common culture that I want to make problem-
atic.
39. Bert Klandermans, The Social Psychology of Protest (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997),
chapter 6.
40. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Taylor, "Social movement
continuity"; Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace
Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Bob Edwards and John
D. McCarthy, "Social Movement Schools," Sociological Forum 7 (1992): 541-550.
41. Smith, in Resisting Reagan, objects to Morris's characterization of halfway houses
as socially isolated and lacking a mass base; in the case of the Central America
peace movement, "the groups that assisted the formation of key movement-carrier
organizations were as important as they were precisely because they were both
socially integrated and possessed mass constituencies" (ibid., 403, n. 9). Smith
distinguishes movement midwives from formal movement organizations rather by
their "trans-movement identities and the specialized role they played in facilitating
the formation of new movement-carrier organizations without becoming protest
organizations themselves" (ibid.). I characterize religious groups as politically
marginal not because they are socially isolated, or politically radical but because,
as religious groups, they are not routinely involved in mainstream politics. The
National Women's Party that Verta Taylor characterizes as an abeyance structure
had ties to earlier forms of protest (and later ones) rather than extensive geo-
graphic ties. Taylor also notes the exclusiveness and highly centralized structure of
the group. These features do seem to characterize other dissident groups. For
example, Tracy, in Direct Action, notes the charismatic leadership and power of

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30
A. J. Muste in radical pacifist circles, and Myles Horton was almost single-hand-
edly responsible for the survival of the Highlander Folk School. On the latter, see
Frank Adams, Unearthing the Seed of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Charlotte,
North Carolina: John F. Blair, 1975).
42. On the Highlander Folk School, see Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Move-
ment, and Adams, Unearthing the Seed of Fire. On American radical pacifists, see
Tracy, Direct Action.
43. These are components of what Sidney Tarrow, in Power in Movement, identifies as
the political opportunity structure. See also Doug McAdam, "Conceptual origins,
current problems, future directions" in Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and
Mayer N. Zald, editors, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23-40.
44. Moreover, they may have had experience with federal directives ignored by local
political elites. For residents of the deep South, for example, the federal govern-
ment had long been an ineffectual actor. Most of the Supreme Court decisions and
executive orders favorable to black claimants in the 1940s and 1950s that Doug
McAdam sees as evidence of the government's amenability to black demands had
little chance of being enforced in Mississippi. FBI agents, even when they appeared
at victims' behest, did little but take notes, and White Citizens Councils were able
to get black leaders audited by the IRS after 1955. The message was not obviously
one of federal support for racial equality. Mississippi's long political isolation meant
that a central challenge for activists was to convince residents that political oppor-
tunities on the national scene had meaning for the state's black Mississippians. As
Charles Payne shows, networks of black activists and allies extending outside the
state were able to communicate to local residents the existence of new prospects.
See Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the
Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
45. See Smith, Resisting Reagan; Edwards and McCarthy, "Social movement schools";
C. Craig Jenkins, "Radical transformation of organizational goals,"Administrative
Science Quarterly 22 (1977): 568-586, on the National Council of Churches'
support for civil rights and farm workers' movements.
46. Tracy, Direct Action, 94.
47. Smith, Resisting Reagan, 111.
48. Tracy, Direct Action.
49. See James DeFronzo, Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements, second edition
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), chapter 8. Thanks to a Theory and Society re-
viewer for directing my attention to this case.
50. See Taylor, "Social Movement Continuity"; Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier,
"Collective identity in social movement communities: Lesbian feminist mobiliza-
tion," in Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, editors, Frontiers in Social
Movement Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 104-129.
51. Taylor shows that members of the National Women's Party did go on to become
leaders in the liberal branch of the women's movement, with four of the ten signers
of NOW's founding statement of purpose members of the NWP. However, she
quotes NWP leader Alice Paul's complaint that NOW members acted "as if
they've discovered the whole idea." "Social movement continuity," 771. Elsewhere,
I discuss 1960 student sit-inners' emphasis on the spontaneity of their protest as a
way to signal their break with an earlier generation of activists. Francesca Polletta,
"'It was like a fever...': Narrative and identity in social protest," Social Problems
45/2 (1998): 137-159.

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31
52. On black Southern churches see Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement;
McAdam, Political Process; Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces. On ethnic organizations
in nineteenth-century Chicago, see Hirsch, Urban Revolt. On Kuwaiti mosques,
see Tetreault, "Civil society."
53. See Anthony Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1973); Tarrow, Power in Movement; and David A. Snow, Louis
Zurcher Jr., and Sheldon Ekland-Olson, "Social networks and social movements:
A microstructural approach to differential recruitment," American Sociological
Review 45 (1980): 787-801.
54. Hirsch, Urban Revolt, 203; see also Johnston, "Mobilization and structure."
55. Calhoun, "The radicalism of tradition," 898.
56. See Roger Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris
from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); David
Knoke, Political Networks: The Structural Perspective (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
57. On "autonomous zones" in a European new social movement, see Francesca
Polletta, "Politicizing childhood: The 1980 Zurich Burns movement," Social Text
33 (Winter 1993): 82-101. On radical feminism, see Echols, Daring to be Bad. On
tenant organizing, see Hirsch, "Protest movements"; on alternative service organ-
izations, see Stoecker, Defending Community.
58. See Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in
Contemporary Society (London: Radius, 1989) and Challenging Codes, and
Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great
Refusal (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1989).
59. On symmetry in relations, see Barry Wellman, "Structural analysis: From method
and metaphor to theory and substance," in Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz,
editors, Social Structures: A Network Approach (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1997), 19-
61.
60. These may or may not be explicitly right-wing groups. Ethnic nationalist groups
may form alternative political, economic, and educational institutions that prefig-
ure an ethnically "pure" society. See, for example, the recent shadow state and
schools formed by Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Fabian Schmidt, "Kosovo
Liberation Army Launches New Offensive," Open Media Research Institute Ana-
lytical Brief, 16 January 1997 (www.omri.cz/Publications/AB).
61. Precisely one of the weaknesses of recent discussions of prefigurative politics has
been an unwillingness to see its value for right-wing groups as well as left-wing
ones. See Allen Hunter, "Prefigurative politics," for a good critique.
62. See Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumans-
burg, New York, 1983); Allen, Free Spaces; and Echols, Daring to Be Bad.
63. David S. Meyer and Nancy Whittier, "Social movement spillover," Social Problems
41/2 (1994): 277-298; and Doug McAdam, "'Initiator' and 'spin-off movements:
Diffusion processes in cycles of protest," in Mark Traugott, editor, Repertoires and
Cycles of Collective Action (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1995), 217-239.
64. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the public sphere," in Craig Calhoun, editor, Haber-
mas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 119. See also Tarrow,
Power in Movement; and Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New
York: Basic Books, 1980). Again, note in the foregoing discussion the assumption
that prefigurative groups strive for equality in relationship. At least one structure
dubbed a free space doesn't fit into my typology: the Latin American Christian
base communities described in Gamson, "Commitment and agency" and "Safe

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32
spaces and social movements," were established by a non-oppositional but extra-

local network (the Catholic Church), but became central to the communities in
which they were established.
65. Stoecker recounts how the cafe, food coop, and health services established by civil
rights and antiwar activists in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis
evolved into community institutions and then formed a recruitment base for sub-
sequent neighborhood mobilization. Stoecker, Defending Community.
66. By the early 1960s, the National Council of Churches "was no longer to dispense
traditional 'Christian services' to individuals but rather to serve as the general
interest advocate and protector of the various deprived groups that had formerly
been objects of missionary concern." Jenkins, "Radical transformation of organ-
izational goals," 573. Jenkins shows that NCC staff was able to act on that
commitment even in the face of lay opposition to support for radical movements
on account of the growth of indirect and nondenominational sources of income,
which insulated staff from members' concerns.
67. See Tetreault, "Civil society."
68. Gould, Insurgent Identities, 20-21.
69. Fantasia and Hirsch, "Culture in rebellion," 146; my emphasis.
70. Ibid., 158.
71. Fantasia and Hirsch's account suggests in different places that the oppositional
culture developed in havens only becomes mobilizing in the context of structural
crisis, and that the culture enacted in havens only becomes oppositional in the
context of already-launched insurgency. The latter formulation implies that havens
play no role in the development of insurgency.
73. Ibid., 213.
74. Ibid., 114.
75. Ibid. See also Couto, "Narrative."
76. McAdam, "Culture and social movements"; Johnston, "Mobilization and struc-
ture." McAdam argues that "long-standing activist subcultures" (45) provide the
tools to interpret "objective" structural opportunities in mobilizing ways. He is
clear in distinguishing between "accounting for the structural factors that have
objectively strengthened the challenger's hand," and "analyzing the processes by
which the meaning and attributed significance of shifting political conditions are
assessed" (39). Culture, on McAdam's view, thus mediates between objective
structural opportunities and objective mobilization; it does not create those op-
portunities. McAdam also delineates a category of "cultural opportunities," for
example, the sudden disasters, like Three Mile Island, that spur public opposition
to a broader condition, or the events, like the Brown v. Board decision, that
demonstrate system vulnerability. But his distinction between structural and cul-
tural opportunities is not accompanied by any discussion of their relationship,
leaving the impression that there is none and that structural opportunities are
non-cultural. In a typologizing effort somewhat similar to mine, Johnston argues
that in more repressive regimes, opposition tends to be accommodative and diffuse,
that is, voiced only among small groups of trusted friends. As repression eases,
opposition is expressed through "duplicitous" but formal organizations and finally
through explicit dissidence in clandestine parties. His schema does list the resour-
ces provided insurgents through the different structures, but devotes little attention
to the roles played by the different groups in identifying and acting on the easing of
governmental repression.

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33
77. Fantasia and Hirsch, "Culture in rebellion."

78. William Gamson and David S. Meyer, "Framing political opportunity," in Doug
McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, editors, Comparative Perspec-
tives on Social Movements (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 275-290.
79. Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford, "Bringing society back in: Symbols,
practices, and institutional contradictions," in Walter W. Powell and Paul J.
DiMaggio, editors, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), 238.
80. Jeff Goodwin, "Toward a new sociology of revolutions," Theory and Society 23
(1994): 731-766. In explaining the rise of the civil rights movement, John Skrentny
shows that the American government's postwar sensitivity to charges of racism
before a world audience was a function of the prior institutionalization of a trans-
national culture of human rights. The structural opportunity for activists was the
superpowers' cold-war competition for influence in the developing nations, but
that competition was shaped by nations' obligation - new since Word War II - to
adhere to human rights standards in order to claim or retain status as a world
leader. "The effect of the cold war on African-American civil rights: America and
the world audience, 1945-1968," Theory and Society 27/2 (April 1998): 237-285.
81. Donatella della Porta, "Social movements and the state: Thoughts on the policing
of protest," in McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, editors, Comparative Perspectives
on Social Movements, 83. Della Porta argues that such differences demonstrate the
role of "institutions and political culture" in producing a stable set of political
opportunities. She thus recognizes the importance of culture in shaping opportu-
nities separate from the perceptions of insurgents, but unnecessarily distinguishes
institutions from culture. Institutions, in Friedland and Alford's persuasive defini-
tion, are "supra-organizational patterns of activity through which humans conduct
their material life in time and space, and symbolic systems through which they
categorize that activity and infuse it with meaning." "Bringing society back in,"
232.
82. Anthony Oberschall, "Opportunities and framing in the East European revolts of
1989," in McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, editors, Comparative Perspectives on
Social Movements, 93-121; Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy, "Collective memory
and cultural constraint: Holocaust myth and rationality in West German politics,"
American Sociological Review 62: 921-936.
83. Tarrow, Power in Movement.
84. Della Porta, "Social movements and the state."
85. See James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), 51-52; and Charles Kurzman, "Structural opportunity and perceived
opportunity in social movement theory: The Iranian revolution of 1979,"American
Sociological Review 61 (1996): 153-170.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., 115.
89. William H. Sewell, "A theory of structure: Duality, agency, and transformation,"
American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1-29.
90. Sidney Tarrow, "States and opportunities: The political structuring of social move-
ments," in McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, editors, Comparative Perspectives on
Social Movements, 50. Law can be considered both as a component of the political
opportunity structure and as progenitor of movement "master frames"; two factors
that, along with mobilizing structures, are considered essential to mobilization.

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34
Yet their relationship has not been examined. See David A. Snow and Robert D.
Benford, "Master frames and cycles of protest," in Aldon Morris and Carol
McClurg Mueller, editors, Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992), 133-155, on master frames.
91. Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness Among
Working-Class Americans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
92. Ronald L. Jepperson and John W. Meyer, "The public order and the construction
of formal organizations," in Powell and DiMaggio, editors, The New Institution-
alism in Organizational Analysis, 204-231; Friedland and Alford, "Bringing soci-
ety back in"; Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People's Lobby (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997).
93. I discuss efforts to integrate culture into social movement theorizing in Polletta,
"Culture and its discontents: Recent theorizing on culture and protest," Sociological
Inquiry 67 (November 1997): 431-450. In the next section, I argue that discussions
of free spaces have emphasized their structural features in accounting for recruit-
ment, but in a way that obscures the meanings in which those structures are
grounded. One consequence that I won't discuss further is that continuities between
structures inside and outside the free space are occluded. For example, the "liminal
moment" described by Victor Turner as a "time and place of withdrawal from normal
modes of social action," Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-
Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 167, reinforces conventions by its
precise, temporary inversion of them. Of rituals of status reversal, Turner says, "By
making the low high and the high low, they reaffirm the structural principle" (176).
94. Charles Tilly, "Domination, resistance, compliance ... discourse,' Sociological
Forum 6/3 (1991): 598.
95. Scott, Domination, 118-119.
96. Ibid., 119.
97. Ibid.
98. Hirsch, Urban Revolt.
99. Ibid., 208.
100. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1985).
101. Indeed, in the historical portions of the book, that point is made. Thus, "Irish
solidarity facilitated political mobilization within the Irish community. But the
cultural and political characteristics of these institutional havens resulted in a
reformist rather than a revolutionary response to Irish problems." Urban Revolt,
142. The problem is that those "cultural and political characteristics" drop out in
Hirsch's more general statements about havens' role in mobilization. Hirsch goes
on to show that the Germans' revolutionary mobilization was short-lived because
the ethnic valence of the movement - its firm identification with German identity
- limited participation to only a minority of the working class. Thus broader
cultural constructions of ethnicity (Hirsch points out that particularly in the Ger-
man case, ethnic attachments were not primordial) were crucial both in galvaniz-
ing protest and in limiting its scope.
102. Rossinow, "'The breakthrough to new life,"' 326.
103. Ibid., 321.
104. Ibid., 329.
105. Tetreault, "Civil society," 278.
106. See Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, "Network analysis, culture, and the
problem of agency," American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994): 1411-1454.

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35
107. Gould, Insurgent Identities.

108. Emirbayer and Goodwin, "Network analysis."
109. Allan Silver, "'Two different sorts of commerce' - friendship and strangership in
civil society," in Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, editors, Private and Public in
Thought and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
110. John W. Mohr and Vincent Duquenne note that "[t]he buying and selling of
commodities constitutes a set of practical activities that can only proceed by virtue
of a set of shared symbolic constructions that includes the idea of private property.
And yet the concept of property (as it is understood) is only meaningful in the
context of a commodified world where market behavior is regularly constructed."
"The duality of culture and practice: Poverty relief in New York City, 1888-1917,"
Theory and Society 26/2-3 (1997): 310.
111. In a similar critique of recent discussions of "social capital," Alejandro Portes and
Patricia Landolt point out that "membership in a community also brings demands
for conformity," and that strong social ties may inhibit individual initiative." "The
downside of social capital," The American Prospect, May-June 1996, 20. While
Portes and his associates are interested in the constraints on entrepreneurial
economic efforts, some of the same constraints may operate on insurgent activity
in tight-knit communities. Thus where Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner note that
the demands placed by family and co-ethnics on an entrepreneur may restrict his
or her range of action, one might substitute the pressures levied by family and
friends on an individual contemplating political action that may lead to violence
or economic reprisals against the activist and his or her kin. Alejandro Portes and
Julia Sensenbrenner, "Embeddedness and immigration: Notes on the social deter-
minants of economic action,"American Journal of Sociology 98 (May 1993): 1320-
1350. See also Michael Woolcock, "Social capital and economic development:
Toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework," Theory and Society 27/2
(April 1998): 151-208, for analysis of the conditions under which social capital
aids and impedes economic development. Thanks to a Theory and Society Editor
for drawing my attention to these three articles.
112. Thus, for example, Ann Mische shows how "interlocutors" or "bridgemakers"
connect disparate identities through people's capacity to recognize different dimen-
sions of themselves in the interlocutor. "Projects, identities, and social networks:
Brazilian youth mobilization and the making of civic culture," paper presented at
the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Toronto, Ontario,
10-14 August 1997. John Padgett and Christopher Ansell have shown how actors'
interstitial position among several networks enables them to claim a brokerage
role and the power associated with it, in part because their ambiguity of position
leads others to attribute a variety of identities to them. "Robust Action and the Rise
of the Medici, 1400-1434," American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993): 1259-1319.
Roberto M. Fernandez and Roger V. Gould, in "A Dilemma of state power:
Brokerage and influence in the national health policy domain," American Journal
of Sociology 99 (1994): 1455-1491, argue that brokers' influence in policymaking is
dependent on a perception that they are impartial with respect to the policy
initiatives that they facilitate by putting otherwise non-interacting actors in com-
munication. Fernandez and Gould develop this argument through an analysis of
the government's role in health policy initiatives, but claim its generalizability.
Emphasizing the construction of collective actors through conflict, Carol Mueller
argues that the collective identity of feminists developed in both liberal and radical
wings through a process of contestation. Thus, with respect to liberal feminism,

201.163.9.162 on Tue, 01 Nov 2022 22:17:27 UTC
36
she recounts that, "Through conflict with Commision [on the Status of Women]
members, congressional representatives, officials, and the media over ... a host of
policies, a relatively small network of politically connected women developed a
conception of gender equality or collective identity," in "Conflict networks," 247.
For a useful primer on network dynamics, see Wellman, "Structural analysis."
113. Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces; Evans, Personal Politics; Couto "Narrative"; Fantasia
and Hirsch, "Culture in rebellion"; Morris, "Centuries of black protests."
114. Author's interviews with Muriel Tillinghast, New York, 5 June, 1996; Robert
Mants, Lowndesboro, Alabama, 25-29 July 1996; field reports and meeting mi-
nutes in Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers Microfilm, 1959-1972
(Sanford, North Carolina: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1982); see espe-
cially "Minutes of SNCC staff meeting" [3/6/62], reel 3 #798-800; "First Report
from Lee County" [7/1/62], reel 19 #839; "Lincoln County Voter Education
Project, Week of August 25-31" [1963], reel 7 #238; Untitled field report, 11/8/63,
reel 5 #964; "Jerry Casey Field Report" [ND], reel 7 #1019; MFDP Newsletter
no. 3, 4/24/65, reel 41 #708-709; "Fifth Congressional District Report, General
Report on Laurel," October 1964, reel 20 #176-185; and in Southern Regional
Council Papers, 1944-1968 Microfilm (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Micro-
films International, 1984), see especially series VI, reel 177, containing Voter
Education Project field reports. See also Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom;
McAdam, Political Process; Adolph Reed, Jr., The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Clayborne Carson, "Civil rights reform
and the black freedom struggle," in Charles Eagles, editor, The Civil Rights Move-
ment in America (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 19-32; John
Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1994).
115. In Mississippi in 1962, one would be hard pressed to see an expansion of political
opportunities. If the federal govenment was proving itself less indifferent than it
had in the past to the interests of black Americans, as McAdam shows in Political
Process, at the local level, it showed little willingness to intervene on behalf of
black residents exercising their right to the franchise. White repression was
stepped up after the Brown v. Board decision in 1954, and major civil rights groups
eventually wrote off the Delta area of Mississippi as too dangerous for extensive
voter registration work. Organizers had often to prove to residents their willing-
ness to stay the course, especially after their first encounters with harassment or
violence. SNCC worker Chuck McDew found a sign reading "SNCC Done
Snuck" on the SNCC office in McComb, Mississippi after some of his colleagues
had been forced out of town. He removed the sign, sat down, "and said we were
open for business, and we were registering voters. It was always very important to
us that we not give people the sense that we had deserted them." McDew's
recollections are in Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, editor, A Circle of Trust: Remember-
ing SNCC (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
116. Georg Simmel, "The Stranger," (1908) in Kurt H. Wolff, editor, The Sociology of
Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950), 404, 407.
117. This is similar to Padgett and Ansell's attribution of Cosimo de' Medici's power to
his interstitial position and the identities and attributes that were as a consequence
projected onto him. See their "Robust action."
118. Some ministers, as well as other prominent black residents, assisted civil rights
organizers anonymously, in some cases, so anonymously that organizers did not
realize until years later that individuals they had denounced as "Uncle Toms" had

201.163.9.162 on Tue, 01 Nov 2022 22:17:27 UTC
37
in fact provided the food or bond money they depended on. Author's interviews
with Wazir Peacock, San Francisco, California, 29 September 1996; Hollis Watkins,
Jackson, Mississippi, 22 November, 1996; Robert Mants, Lowndesboro, Alabama,
25-29 July 1996.
119. "Frank Smith field report, Holly Springs May 21, 1963," Southern Regional Council
Papers microfilm, reel 177 #1524.
120. An organizer training civil rights workers in the early 1960s instructed that while it
was important to make connections with local black leaders, "for action, a strong
outside stimulus probably would be necessary to break what frequently was a local
paralysis," quoted in Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 129. Payne relates
that Mississippi residents who were identified as potential leaders "were often sent
to Septima Clark's citizenship training center in Dorchester, Georgia. The trip
helped people develop a sense of the larger movement and of themselves as move-
ment people," I've Got the Light of Freedom, 249. Mississippi organizer Bob Moses
wrote in 1962 that student organizers "very seldom are free to work in their own
home towns because of the pressure brought to bear on their parents and/or their
relatives. And then, when this situation does not prevail, they are likely to be
prophets without honor at home. Thus Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins" - two of
SNCC's most effective organizers - "were able to recruit some 250 people to go
down and register in Hattiesburg and Forrest County, but were not successful in
recruiting more than two or three in McComb, their home city." "Report to VEP,
RE: Mississippi Voter Registration Project. From: Bob Moses ND (rec'd Dec. 5,
1962)," Southern Regional Council Papers microfilm, reel 177 #1553-1557. The
view that people should not organize in their own communities is common among
organizers. Several rationales appear in their statements. Saul Alinsky wrote in
1945, "The organizer of a People's Organization will shortly discover one simple
maxim: In order to be part of all, you must be part of none. In dealing with the
innumerable rivalries, fears, jealousies, and suspicions within a community the
organizer will discover that ... he cannot enjoy the confidence even to a limited
degree of all other groups as long as he is personally identified with one or two of
the community agencies," Reveille for Radicals (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1945), 204; see also Sanford D. Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul
Alinsky - His Life and Legacy (New York: Vintage, 1989). Cesar Chavez gave
another reason in a paper in the late 1960s: "When you begin by knowing your
neighbors, you begin to eliminate them. Then you say, Well, my cousin over there.
No, she's not interested. My uncle. No, he's against it. My mother. She's too old.
My brother? He's only interested in TV. If you were not to know the people, you
would go out there full of spirit to sell them on the idea.... I would rather work in
a community where no one knows me and I haven't prejudiced anyone out of the
picture," (Untitled, undated paper in author's collection). Providing a third rationale,
Alinsky-trained organizer Mike Miller says today, "People in your community will
say, 'who are you to tell us what to do?'" Author's interview with Mike Miller,
Washington D.C., 1 May, 1998.
121. Evans, Personal Politics; Buechler, Women's Movements; Echols, Daring to be Bad;
Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces; Gitlin, The Sixties; McAdam, Political Process.
122. The following draws on Casey Hayden, paper prepared for the Fannie Lou Hamer
Memorial Symposium Lecture Series, Jackson, Mississippi, October 4, 1995;
author's interviews with Casey Hayden and Elaine DeLott Baker, Denver, Colo-
rado, 9-11 March 1995; Emmie Adams, St. Johnsbury, Vermont, 8-10 July 1996;
and Mary King, Washington, D.C., 2 May 1998.

201.163.9.162 on Tue, 01 Nov 2022 22:17:27 UTC
38
123. Scott, Domination.

124. Mark Granovetter, "The strength of weak ties," American Journal of Sociology 78
(1973): 1360-1380; Emirbayer and Goodwin, "Network analysis."
125. Doug McAdam, "Recruitment to high-risk activism: The case of Freedom
Summer," American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986): 64-90; Snow, Zurcher, and
Ekland-Olsen, "Social networks"; Oberschall, "Social conflict"; but see Jasper, The
Art of Moral Protest.

201.163.9.162 on Tue, 01 Nov 2022 22:17:27 UTC

&quot;Free Spaces&quot; in Collective Action

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"Free Spaces" in Collective Action

Author(s): Francesca Polletta

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Good metaphors may be essential to social science. By putting "the

The term's appeal is considerable. Not only does it discredit a view of

Theory and Society 28: 1-38, 1999.

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This reconceptualization still does not answer to a second set of prob-

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existing relations of status and deference among the aggrieved popula-

Theoretical convergence on the free space concept

In a much-quoted passage, Sara Evans and Harry Boyte write:

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Divergence and ambiguity

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Small size, intimacy, and the rootedness of free spaces in long-standing

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Finally, what are the connections between the counterhegemonic chal-

It seems clear that by "free space" analysts have something more in

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tain, and strengthen oppositional identities and solidarities (especially

An alternative: Structures of association and preconditions for

Transmovement, indigenous, and prefigurative groups38 all operate

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Table 1. Associative structures in social movements

Structure Character of Role in mobilization Examples

Trans- Extensive Well-equipped to identify Highlander Folk School,

Indigenous Dense ties, Well-equipped to supply Southern black church,

Prefigurative Symmetric Well-equipped to develop "Women's only" spaces,

interrelations; the pattern of those relations is culture). More on this

Transmovement structures are the "halfway houses" described by Aldon

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A second structure often dubbed a free space is indigenous to a com-

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Discussions of these groups have focused on their political, social, and

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of deference and authority, not equality.60 My association of prefigura-

Detailing the patterns of relations that make up each of these structures

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One: Culture and "structural" opportunities

In their discussion of what they call "havens," "liberated zones," "pre-

Contrary to Fantasia and Hirsch, James Scott sees subordinated

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The problem with these accounts of mobilization is their privileging of

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surgencies.84 A culture/structure dichotomy obscures the many instan-

Scott goes on to pose the "central issue" as what Barrington Moore

An alternative, following Sewell, is to conceptualize structures as cul-

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opportunities by framing conditions in a way that makes collective

It also reveals, contrarily, overlooked cultural obstacles to protest.

To get at these resources and constraints requires that we abandon a

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Two: Culture and "structural" ties

In his review of Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Charles

Actually, Scott does provide an answer, but a misleading one. "Social

What that misses, of course, are the ways in which densely-structured

To illustrate, I turn to Eric Hirsch's rich account of working-class

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man workers launched a revolutionary movement while Irish and

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"Free Spaces" in Collective Action

"Free Spaces" in Collective Action